Legitimation is spatialized, in its invocation and reproduction of hierarchies as well as the claiming of particular domains. This chapter examines two spatialized practices: extensity as the projection of scale and depth, and territoriality as the demarcation of boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. It looks firstly at lateral legitimation across Bagamoyo district in these spatialized forms. While extensity is the predominant dynamic in this field, mimicking the architecture of the Tanzanian state, there are also territorial practices, especially when angled downward to the hallowed ‘community’. Second, the chapter examines NGO extensity at the outreaches of Bagamoyo’s ‘sovereign borders’ in underserved Kibindu, where developmental activity was solicited and there proved considerable ‘space to govern’. In this context, territoriality fell away as a basis for legitimation and instead Bagamoyo’s most extensive NGO served to ‘co-produce’ the state. However, the situation was strongly reversed in urbanizing Kiharaka, wherein NGO territoriality through explicit practices of inclusion and exclusion found traction. In the divergent contexts of Kibindu and Kiharaka, extensity and territoriality therefore proved to be competing forms of spatial power.

The book opens with the provocation that empirical legitimacy not only remains poorly evinced, it is in its current formulations irredeemably so. As long as legitimacy studies remain locked in the politics of crisis, of repairing deficits to a Western ‘preconcept’, the everyday crafting of authority will remain overlooked. The chapter looks to the expanding non-state, specifically non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to paint a picture of productivity, cautious expansion and cumulative change rather than that of deficit, crisis or threat. It asks how NGOs craft their everyday authority to act in coastal Tanzania, far from the air-conditioned rooms that normally denote the international sphere. In doing so, it abandons the residual state-centrism and positivism that still characterize legitimacy studies. World politics must gravitate away from an insular, at times recursive, focus on Western normative templates towards understanding global phenomena as locally articulated. The introductory chapter also provides a synopsis of the Tanzanian case, of the legitimation practices themselves and an overview of the book.

Voluntarism, and its associated virtue, has long been a legitimation device in the construction of public authority. It has been theorized, at least in Western political philosophy, as a counterweight to the excesses of big government or big business. In some studies in Africa, voluntarism has been married to instrumentalist accounts of doing politics. This chapter highlights the nuanced complexities in invoking voluntarism, its ideational and material components, and the multifaceted opportunities and obligations it affords. It demonstrates continuity between government and non-government around the production of this form of authority. However, legitimation is a practice negotiated by its ‘publics’. In this case, this comprises volunteers who must negotiate the vertical, often extractive pressures from external actors of their physical and emotional labours as well as lateral contestation by peers of their own authority to act in the interests of Others. This chapter explores the material and ideational legitimation that volunteer networks afford non-governmental organizations as well as the negotiation and contestation of voluntarism’s work on the part of volunteers themselves.

Legitimacy studies, even those more sociologically attuned, remain committed to ascertaining the presence or absence of legitimacy. What appears to embrace fluidity, iteration and hybridity ultimately proves static in its binary yes/no conception. This book’s intent was to embrace the multiplicity, multivalency and making of legitimation in postcolonial contexts. Each non-governmental organization (NGO) intervention is legitimated iteratively; a static belief in the legitimacy of an NGO, or of NGOs in general, has no meaning. Furthermore, legitimation practices are mutually constitutive even when placed in opposition to each other. At that moment in Tanzania, in the wake of peak liberalization, this book mapped two nexuses of legitimation practice: territoriality/representation/materiality and state/extensity/voluntarism, playing out to different effect in different circumstances. Each nexus is transitory, subject to cumulative change and reconfiguration over time. Given this, the informal legitimation practices so-honed by NGOs in tight spaces will prove critical to non/state survival and its cautious expansion in Tanzania and beyond. This chapter thus lastly comments on prospects for broader non/state legitimation within authoritarian capitalist futures.

This chapter lays out the epistemological, methodological and ethical considerations in answering the book’s core question. Legitimation requires a considerable amount of work and indeed creativity, rendered invisible by some methodologies to date. A practice-based approach, here bolstered by the use of critical ethnography, places the agential, iterative and relational aspects of legitimation centre frame. Such an approach benefits from late modern writers in the West but also crucially insights from anti/postcolonial scholars, including on the African continent. The chapter sets out a moral concern regarding the location of the always assumed, never seen, legitimation ‘subject’, obscured by the shadow of theory-making or developmental problem-solving. It argues that interpretive praxeology speaks to both methodological and ethical concerns, aiding the move to deverticalize research. The chapter also sets out the particular value of the Tanzanian case in the wake of its rapid liberalization, both in its specificities but also its broader resonance as a microcosm of the reconstituting public, with the global inserted into the local in new and illuminating ways.

This chapter lays down the theoretical groundwork for reconceptualizing legitimation as practice over legitimacy as a stable state, integrating three theoretical developments. The first of these, specifically on the topic of legitimacy, is a movement away from normative towards empirical enquiry. The chapter builds on recent, millennial attempts to do so but adds a long overdue interrogation of legitimacy’s leftover Western centrisms. The second development is a movement away from the state as the primary locus regarding legitimation. There has been a concordance across disciplines that public authority is not limited to, nor contained by, the state. New, hybrid forms of authority, straddling public and private, local and global, state and society, encapsulate what the book terms non/state governance, within which state and non-state actors are enmeshed. The third development is the burgeoning field of practice-based enquiry, whereby methodological space has opened up in all relevant disciplines to spotlight the practices through which power is exercised and its conditions (re)produced. There has been a productive concordance around practice as ‘fertile’ ground for a range of disciplines in the West but also for eminent scholars in Africa who foreground the multiplicity of the normally minimised African subject, who negotiates structures of coloniality within everyday life.

Legitimation via the representative claim is existentially critical for non-governmental organisations in the absence of meaningful consent or authorization. The need to so compensate is manifest in iterative claims to be ‘one of the people’, to be close to the people and ultimately to stand for the people, challenging state representative monopolies that have unravelled in Tanzania, as elsewhere. Claims to stand for the people, however, are fleeting and give way to the conclusive need to act for the people when situations of uncertainty and of perceived failure solicit a more authoritative stance. This chapter expounds the hybridity of contemporary representational practice, whereby state and non-state actors continually reconcile claims to stand and to act for Others. In doing so, it uniquely identifies a productive confluence in mainstream representation theory and long-established anti/postcolonial writings in understanding representational multivalency and making today, disrupting default notions of representation in the West.

With personal information an overt ‘site of struggle’ in contemporary politics, how do non-state actors gather data but also craft their authority to do so? This chapter shifts the site of Informational Relations spatially, away from the lofty ‘international’, as well as temporally, to earlier in this chain of events. The authority of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to gather data is often treated as antecedent, but collecting Others’ information and acting as repositories are themselves invocations of authority. While a key driver of this book has been the importance of ideas in crafting everyday authority, legitimation’s material consequences are highly conspicuous in this process of gathering information: it is a core NGO ‘currency’. This chapter focuses on the collection of data, whereby the authority of NGOs is instantiated through acts of monitoring and verification, both laterally with respect to peers and vertically to communities. It pits NGO against NGO; NGO against local government; village volunteers against their leaders and peers. NGOs thus find themselves enmeshed within a complex informational ecosystem that is truly global. Given the clear fungibility of information, the gathering of data proved one of the most contentious legitimation practices.

One of the starkest legitimation practices lies in how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) positioned themselves vis-à-vis the organs of the state and vice versa. There is no more enduring division in political science than that posited between ‘state’ and ‘society’: a divide that is blurred in practice but remains ideationally pertinent in Tanzania’s political landscape. NGOs work the state–society ideational divide and garner capital from both. This chapter maps the use of state relations but also ‘state-like practices’ by Bagamoyo’s two international NGOs. One was heavily aligned with government practices to the point of mimicry and indeed co-extended with and co-produced the state. This worked to great effect in some cases and to abject failure in others. The other international NGO, by contrast, was increasingly distant from and antagonistic to local and national government, meaning its fortunes were precisely reversed. In both cases, however, positionalities were not fixed. Both NGOs varied their stances towards local government when expedient, highlighting how legitimation is continually recalibrated. Positionality vis-à-vis the state is thus fluid and ambiguous but remains strategic and deliberately visible, in crafting the space to govern.